We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [36]
Of course, just because I can’t manage to swallow all the blame doesn’t mean that others won’t heap it on me anyway, and I’d have been glad to provide a useful receptacle if I thought the heaping did them any good. I always come back to Mary Woolford, whose experience of injustice had hitherto run to a particularly inconvenient one-way street. I suppose I’d call her spoiled; she did stir up rather an excessive fuss when Laura didn’t make the track team, even though her daughter, however lovely, was physically languid and not the least athletic. But it may not be fair to call it a character flaw that someone’s life has always gone well with minimal impedance. Moreover, she was a restive woman, and like my Democratic coworkers given to indignation by nature. Previous to Thursday, she had been accustomed to venting this quantity, which I presume would otherwise build up in her at combustive levels, on campaigns to have the town council put in a pedestrian crossing or to ban homeless shelters from Gladstone; consequently, the denial of funds for such a crossing or the arrival of hairy riffraff on the outskirts of town had previously constituted her version of catastrophe. I’m not sure how such people manage to get their heads around proper disaster after having repeatedly exercised the full powers of their consternation on traffic.
So I can see how a woman who’d long slept restlessly on peas might have difficulty lying on an anvil. Nevertheless, it’s a pity that she couldn’t remain within the still, serene well of sheer incomprehension. Oh, I realize you can’t stay bewildered—the need to understand or at least to pretend you do is too great—but I myself have found wide white mystification a place in my mind that is blessedly quiet. And I fear that Mary’s alternative outrage, her evangelical fever to bring the guilty to book, is a clamorous place that creates the illusion of a journey, a goal to be achieved, only so long as that goal remains out of reach. Honestly, I had to fight the impulse at the civil trial to take her aside and charge gently, “You can’t imagine that you’ll feel better if you win, do you?” In fact, I became convinced that she would find more consolation in having what proved a surprisingly slight parental negligence case dismissed, because then she’d be able to nurture this theoretical alternative universe in which she had successfully unloaded her agony onto a callous, indifferent mother who deserved it. Somehow Mary seemed confused as to what the problem was. The problem was not who was punished for what. The problem was that her daughter was dead. Although I couldn’t have been more sympathetic, it was not subject to unloading onto anyone else.
Besides, I might be more kindly disposed to this ultra-secular notion that whenever bad things happen someone must be held accountable if a curious little halo of blamelessness did not seem to surround those very people who perceive themselves as bordered on every side by agents of wickedness. That is, it seems to be the same folks who are inclined to sue builders who did not perfectly protect them from the depredations of an earthquake who will be the first to claim that their son failed his math test because of attention deficit disorder, and not because he spent the night before at a video arcade instead of studying complex fractions. Further, if underlying this huffy relationship to cataclysm—the hallmark of the American middle class—were a powerful conviction that bad things simply shouldn’t happen, period, I might find the naïveté disarming. But the core conviction of these incensed sorts—who greedily rubberneck interstate pileups—seems rather that bad things shouldn’t happen to them. Lastly, though you know I’ve never been especially religious after having all that Orthodox guff forced on me as a child